They are two different languages, with different grammar and different vocabulary. Speaking of vocabulary German's is mostly Germanic while English's is partly Germanic but has many foreign Romance (mainly French and Latin) words.

I know that German has gender and English does not, and that German has the fancy umalauts and such, but other than that, what are the differences?

Different vocabulary (see above), gender, and noun cases. The umlauts are just orthographic conventions and German also has the ß. There are probably more differences that I don't know of but I'm sure someone else here can give you a more complete list.

And WHY did English get rid of them?

English never had them so it never got rid of them... It did however have æ, þ, and ð which it has gotten rid of over time.

Native: English (NW American)Advanced: Spanish Intermediate: French Beginning: Arabic (MSA/Egyptian) Some day: German

Generally, the differences are a) retention of Germanic word stock which has been replaced by French in English, b) a more synthetic grammar c) a more transparent orthography which also shows the changes which have occurred in the history of the language, such as the High German consonant shift.

Also English used to have the letter wynn "ƿ", which was pronounced /w/. It was based on the Anglo-Saxon runic letter of the same name, and was implemented into English because the Latin orthography lacked a letter for the /w/ phoneme. When the French (the blighters!) invaded southern England in 1066 and conquered the majority of the island of Great Britain, they made French the language of the rich and well educated. If they had to write English for any reason they would write ƿ as "vv", and eventually this became the standard. Wynn disappeared around the 1300s. Later the vv ligature was squashed into a single grapheme, "w".

Back on topic, I've never heard any evidence that German is SOV. The conjugated verb always comes between the subject and object; yes, non-finite verbs do come last, but those aren't counted in the word order.And how do you front objects in German anyway? I thought you couldn't do that. I know that if you stick something onto the beginning of the sentence the subject and verb have to switch:(Please forgive me if I am misremembering the sentences)

Tikolm wrote:Back on topic, I've never heard any evidence that German is SOV. The conjugated verb always comes between the subject and object; yes, non-finite verbs do come last, but those aren't counted in the word order.

According to whom?

Tikolm wrote:And how do you front objects in German anyway? I thought you couldn't do that. I know that if you stick something onto the beginning of the sentence the subject and verb have to switch:(Please forgive me if I am misremembering the sentences)